All articles starting with F
15,892 articles
Free indirect speech
Free indirect speech, or free indirect discourse (FID; French style indirect libre, German erlebte Rede), reports a character's speech or thought in third-person past-tense narration without quotation marks or a reporting clause, mixing indirect-discourse tense and pronouns with direct-discourse indexicals and exclamations; named by Bally in 1912, exemplified by Austen and Flaubert.
Free induction decay
Free induction decay (FID) is the damped time-domain signal recorded in pulsed magnetic resonance: after a radio-frequency pulse excites the spins, Fourier transformation converts it into the NMR spectrum.
Free jazz
Free jazz: avant-garde jazz style emerging in the late 1950s with Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler, abandoning chord progressions, fixed forms, and meter; named by Coleman's 1960 album Free Jazz.
Free kick (association football)
A free kick in association football is a restart awarded after an offense, taken by the opposing side, with direct and indirect types under Law 13.
Free Larry Hoover Benefit Concert
Free Larry Hoover Benefit Concert: December 9, 2021 joint show by Ye and Drake with Sunday Service Choir at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, streamed free on Amazon platforms and IMAX, advocating prison and sentencing reform for Larry Hoover.
Free Lie algebra
A free Lie algebra is a Lie algebra on a free generating set, the Lie-algebra analog of a free group, with any map of the generators extending to a homomorphism.
Free logic
Free logic, named by Karel Lambert in 1960, is a family of first-order systems that drops the classical assumption that every singular term denotes an existing object.
Free love
Free love is a social movement originating in the mid-nineteenth century that holds love, sex, and marriage should follow personal choice, not state or religious regulation.
Free market
A free market is a market where prices and terms of exchange are set by voluntary transactions between buyers and sellers, not by coercive central authorities.
Free Methodist Church
The Free Methodist Church is a Methodist denomination founded in 1860 in New York by B. T. Roberts, known for entire sanctification and opposing slavery and pew rents.
Free module
A free module, also called a free vector space, is a module with a basis, so every element is uniquely a linear combination of basis elements.
Free monoid
The free monoid on a set is the monoid of all finite words over it, with concatenation as the operation and the empty word as identity.
Free neutron decay
Free neutron decay is the radioactive decay of a neutron outside an atomic nucleus into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino, with a mean life of about 15 minutes.
Free Nutritious Meals
Free Nutritious Meals: no-charge school meals, chiefly US universal free school meal policies via the National School Lunch Program and Community Eligibility Provision, with state programs in nine states and Finland's free school meal tradition.
Free object
A free object is an algebraic structure built from a set of generators with no relations beyond those the structure type forces, so maps of the generators extend uniquely.
Free Officers movement (Egypt)
The Free Officers movement (ad-Dubbat al-Ahrar) was a clandestine group of Egyptian junior army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Naguib that overthrew King Farouk on July 23, 1952, ended the monarchy, and created Egypt's republic.
Free Palestine Movement
Free Palestine Movement (FPM), a Palestinian-Syrian pro-Assad militia and community organization led by Yasser Qashlaq, controlled Damascus's Yarmouk camp during the Syrian civil war; its members face German and Swedish war crimes prosecutions.
Free Palestine Party (New Zealand)
Free Palestine (Palestine Free from the River to the Sea Party) is a New Zealand single-issue anti-Zionist political party, registered 5 August 2026, led by Paul Hopkinson; it contested the 2026 general election.
Free Papua Movement
Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM), umbrella Papuan independence organization with armed wing TPNPB, founded mid-1960s, proclaimed independence 1 July 1971, rejects the 1969 Act of Free Choice, escalating insurgency since 2018.
Free particle
A free particle is a quantum-mechanical particle subject to no force, described by plane waves and localized wave packets that spread in time, with a continuous energy spectrum rather than discrete levels.
Free Pascal
Free Pascal, originally FPK-Pascal, is an open-source Pascal and Object Pascal compiler started by Florian Klämpfl in 1993, compatible with Turbo Pascal 7.0 and Delphi and paired with the Lazarus IDE.
Free Patriotic Movement (التيار الوطني الحر)
Free Patriotic Movement (التيار الوطني الحر), Lebanese Christian party founded 1994 by Michel Aoun, later led by Gebran Bassil; Hezbollah's main Christian ally 2006–2022, gave Lebanon a president in 2016, and declined electorally after 2022.
Free people of color
Free people of color, French gens de couleur libres, were legally free people of African or mixed ancestry in American slave societies; prominent in Spanish America and New Orleans, where they were nearly a quarter of the city by 1830.
Free Peru
Free Peru (Perú Libre) is a Marxist-Leninist-Mariateguist Peruvian party founded by Vladimir Cerrón; it won the 2021 presidency with Pedro Castillo (50.13%) and 37 congressional seats, and returned to the executive in February 2026 under José María Balcázar.
Free ports in the British West Indies
Free ports in the British West Indies were designated Caribbean ports, first opened by the Free Port Act of 1766, where foreign merchants could legally trade with British merchants.
Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland
The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland is a conservative Reformed Presbyterian denomination formed in 1893 by ministers who left the Free Church over the Westminster Confession.
Free primary education in Malawi
Free primary education in Malawi is the 1994 government policy abolishing fees in public primary schools, which added more than 1 million pupils in its first year.
Free probability
Free probability is a branch of probability theory in which random variables are noncommuting operators and independence is modeled on free products, introduced by Dan-Virgil Voiculescu in the 1980s.
Free product
The free product of groups is a group built from them by identifying only their identity elements, so elements of different factors do not commute; it is the coproduct in the category of groups.
Free public transport
Free public transport, also known as zero-fare or fare-free transport, removes fares from public transit, funded by taxes or subsidies; Luxembourg made all travel free in 2020.